A Star Trek Podcast

Main menu

Post navigation

Star Trek timelines pt 2

So I have been playing Timelines for a few weeks now and thought I’d share my thoughts.

I’ve worked through various missions on “normal,” and have found quite a few problems. The first and most apparent one is the small amount of missions you can run in one go. Your chronitons can take a while to fill up, but you can burn through 40-50 of them in no time. Especially when your chasing loot. This means you end up playing periodically while you wait for them to refill . The other alternative while waiting for this is to run faction missions, which you buy via merits, which you earn by running missions, which need chronitons…you can see where I’m going.

The other alternative is to buy merits with dilithium which you buy with real money. So while waiting for your chronitons, you can buy merits, using dilithium, which use real money via in game purchases. You can then run faction missions which may or not drop the loot you need to rank up a player.

Which brings me to the next problem. Ranking up.

I’ve have been trying to rank up my command staff and my engineer staff, in order to complete the next mission. A mission I have been stuck on for three days now, simply because my officers are to low. My engineer (Mr Tucker no less), needs one item to rank up. I have ran the mission to get this one item 57 times, I kid you not. 57 times to get one thing for one player. One of four I need to complete one mission. Jayneway meanwhile also needs two components. When not running the missions for Tucker I run the one for Jayneway. Just to lighten the intense boredom. Jayneway is now on 42. So that’s 57 times for one thing for Tucker and 42 times for one piece for Jayneway. This is not unusual, pop into the chat stream in game and a lot of people are stuck and unable to progress & so are getting frustrated. You do not endear your self to your player base by making it difficult for them to complete even the lowest levels.

Still no pvp in game so alas I cant comment on that, but I can comment on in game purchases. A complaint amongst the players is that they’ve made in game purchases and not received them.

In a attempt to boost chroniton delivery you can make an in game purchase and get a VIP level. You also get in game advantages such as better daily prizes. I personally made an in game purchase and received…nothing.

Off to the support forums to ask about my in game purchase and…nothing. I’ll give them till tomorrow I thought. Tomorrow came and still nothing. Back to support, yet another email and…nothing.

This took a week to resolve and has totally put me off in game purchases. I play Star Trek online, in game purchases in STO happen immediately. You click confirm and its done and immediately available. Also in STO, you can play missions without endlessly running something over and over in order to gain one item, of many items you need.

The other problem with timelines is the fleet system, it simply serves no point. You gain absolutely nothing from being in a fleet. Sure you have a chat room. But you also have that in the main game. I can’t see any advantage from being a fleet member. You can’t run a mission together, you can’t send each other equipment, you can’t share anything apart from tips, which again you can do via the normal in game chat. Fleets are just there.

As it stands timelines is ok as a casual phone based game and the graphics are good. But the game play is frustrating, the grinding is terrible and at times soul destroying in its repetitive nature. While in game purchases need speeding up and also need to actually happen.

On a scale on 1-10 I’d give it 5, shows promise by needs a lot of work.